SBJ Facilities: What an NFL flag venue may look like

While walking/bike riding one morning this week, my 6-year-old daughter noted how unfair it was that adults didn’t get a summer vacation, too.

Vivian M. for President, 2028

She then duly crashed her bike into a trash bin.

Renderings and a flythrough animation are providing the first look at a concept for an NFL flag football league venue.

The indication, according to a source that shared the images with SBJ, is the stadium will be a modular one, not a permanent build. The source said the leagues will debut in a single city, before later expanding to more locations in future seasons. Peter O’Reilly (NFL EVP/Club business, International & League Events) told The Athletic earlier this year that the men’s and women’s pro flag leagues will launch late spring or early summer of 2027 in advance of the sport’s inclusion in the 2028 L.A. Olympics.

The league doesn’t have a name or logo yet; the video says “Pro Flag League,” but that’s a placeholder until a permanent name and brand identity are finalized.

The images and video show an intimate, three-level outdoor stadium with thousands of seats, several prominent premium seating areas facing midfield, and at least one large videoboard in an upper-seating bowl corner.

Adjacent to the stadium is a flag football field, presumably for public use, and vehicles on display, likely representing automotive sponsor activations. A smaller building next to the secondary field appears to be either a merch store or a premium space or bar/restaurant of some sort. And a large stage facing the stadium bookends the property.

The renderings and flythrough video are being used in various presentations made about the league, as well as in requests for proposals seeking potential host cities and architectural firms. A modular structures vendor will eventually be sought, too.

The sports industry’s comfort with temporary and modular structures has grown dramatically in recent years, and these concept renderings indicate the NFL will lean on an impermanent structure to get its fledgling flag league off the ground. Should it adopt a touring model, the stadium’s modular nature will become even more important.

The NFL selected TMRW Sports, the parent company of TGL, to run the flag football league back in February. TMRW developed the TGL’s tech-heavy SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., but that unique venue is geared toward broadcast. This flag league concept appears, at first glance, better suited for the in-person attendee, but like SoFi, it may have an abundance of novel tech.

It’s not clear how much of TMRW Sports and the NFL’s $160 million flag football league pot will go into the venue. Sources told SBJ’s Ben Fischer in April that Ariel Investments, Bessemer Venture Partners, Blue Pool Capital, Dynasty Equity, Silver Lake and Sixth Street all provided $15 million of that total, while each NFL team owner kicked in a million.

After a long week of travel, Johno Harris sat in Lincoln Property Company’s Charlotte office with a view of the skyline his family helped build.

Dallas-based Lincoln has more than 4,000 employees, 30-plus offices worldwide and over $30 billion in real estate assets under management. Increasingly, that portfolio includes sports mixed-use developments that Harris oversees from his Charlotte perch.

Lincoln entered sports development with The Star, the Cowboys’ pioneering HQ and mixed-use district, and is now leading the Browns’ Brook Park development.

Harris said the company is in discussions or active projects with owners across every major league, a noteworthy development because few, if any, of the large national real estate firms have gotten deeply, consistently involved in sports-adjacent mixed-use so far.

Here are my main takeaways from our hour-long chat on a Friday afternoon in June:

Lincoln is blending a national platform with local expertise

Since its founding roughly 60 years ago, Lincoln expanded into cities and regions by finding (and acquiring or partnering with) a local market leader. The Harris family was that market leader in the Carolinas.

Lincoln has approached its sports-related projects the same way, except for the involvement of the its national corporate advisory and solutions group. Co-led from Charlotte by Harris, it handles sports and entertainment projects and has the necessary expertise in areas such as public-private partnerships.

“It’s got to have economics that work in the community,” Harris said. “You can’t go build 12-story concrete in Brook Park, Ohio where you can build 12-story concrete in San Francisco or Dallas.”

Stone Point investment has sparked sports work

Lincoln recapitalized in 2023 through a major investment from Stone Point Capital, a move that saw Harris’ dad, Charlotte real estate magnate Johnny Harris, and other original Lincoln founders step back from day-to-day leadership. Lincoln remains privately held by its founding families.

Lincoln’s corporate solutions group has developed studios for movie companies, worked with Netflix and Google, and has a growing roster of sports-related projects, including a $3 billion development that just broke ground in Draper, Utah. Lincoln also provides owners’ rep services, which it’s doing for the Charlotte Hornets’ Novant Health Performance Center project.

With a less siloed approach, Lincoln is pursuing the sports-adjacent development market wholeheartedly as real estate transforms the value of sports organizations. Forbes pegged the Browns’ valuation at $3.9 billion in 2023; in 2026, with the stadium and mixed-use project underway, it was $6.4 billion.

Mixed-use “ultimately brings a different valuation because nobody wants to go invest money and just let it sit there,” Harris said. “They want it to compound and grow.”

Harris thinks Lincoln’s access to the capital markets and the financial know-how necessary to price a $12 billion project pipeline will be its differentiator in the sports world.

“We’re financing billions of dollars worth of construction a year. We know how to finance things, and we know who the major institutions and the major players are in order to do it.”

College sports-adjacent real estate is a big target, too

Mixed-use is equally popping on the college side, where universities are trying to generate new revenue for athletics while addressing a swirl of competing education trends, including decreasing enrollment at some schools and housing shortages at others.

To that end, Lincoln acquired Capstone Development Partners six months ago to augment its student housing development capabilities and bring a fuller offering to the numerous college sports real estate RFPs that are hitting the market. The Capstone acquisition was one of nearly 10 Lincoln has made since the Stone Point recap.

Working with the Haslams

Harris said a project expected to take up to a decade requires complete alignment with Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam.

“They’re great partners. From concepts to execution, they want to be part of it. And in the same instance, they want to understand why. They want to understand how,” Harris said. “And as a result, as we’ve moved through this process, when we come to an issue or a situation, they know how we got there. They know why we got there. And then all of a sudden it’s like, ‘well, OK, let’s figure it out together.’”

Several days after I spoke to Keenan Gibbons, a licensed landscape architect in Michigan who is using drones to measure urban heat, the temperature hit 100 degrees in Charlotte.

I had just visited FIFA Fan Festivals in Atlanta and Kansas City, invigorating experiences with elite people-watching that desperately needed more shade for the thousands of fans milling about.

Gibbons’ drone-aided research is focusing on that very issue, underscoring the overlooked importance of creating shade in public places — especially with high concentrations of people, like sporting events — and selecting building materials that reflect solar radiation to combat soaring urban temperatures.

Nearly 10 years ago, Gibbons was working on a streetscape project when he ran up against the limitations of using satellite-produced thermal readings. One pixel of the satellite image equaled a 100-foot square on the ground. He couldn’t zoom in close enough.

Gibbons tried a drone, which provided immediate results. Due to federal regulations, he couldn’t fly his drone more than 400 feet above ground; the satellites orbit Earth more than 400 miles high.

The drone images revealed “vast areas of pavement that register routinely 20, 30, 40 degrees warmer than immediately adjacent pavement,” Gibbons said, hot zones that register as dark oranges and reds in the drone images. Areas beneath trees would only be a degree or two off the ambient temperature.

The temperature of rare-cooked steak is 120 degrees; well-done is 160. Gibbons routinely measures sidewalk temperatures over 160. He once measured a 186-degree building rooftop (made from a tar material), just one of the startling readings that shocked him in the years since.

“Society pays for it if we don’t,” address urban heat, Gibbons said. “It’s just whoever is footing the bill. It’ll get paid for by healthcare, HVAC ... it’s going to get paid.”

Some heat-reducing ideas

The sports industry is designing dozens of mixed-use developments around arenas and stadiums, and creating abundant shade will be critical in making them places where people actually want to be.

A few days after I spoke with Gibbons, some World Cup host cities canceled fan festival events because of the heat. The “fans come early, stay late” dynamic that sports owners are chasing with mixed-use development melts under withering sun and humidity.

Sports teams can’t single-handedly solve climate change, but they can put artificial shade structures into their districts while newly planted trees grow (and, one day, contribute to the cooling effort).

Gibbons is trying to steer the design and construction worlds away from using sun-absorbing, petroleum or tar-based, black roof coatings and toward materials (for roofs, sidewalks, roads, benches, and so on) with low emissivity, meaning they better deflect solar radiation. Another idea is to reduce the code-required space between planted trees, so that uninterrupted tree canopies can grow. Legislation and zoning code changes will likely be required to make a real dent.

“I don’t know how much traction that’s going to get,” Gibbons said. “Climate stuff has a lot of stigma and ‘green’ is a polarizing word, and that’s why I’m trying to move away from the qualitative to the quantitative.”

This article has been corrected from its original version

In advance of the July 14 MLB All-Star game at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, concessionaire Aramark Sports + Entertainment went to the masses to pick a new dish to put on the event’s menu. Betsy’s Banana Ice Cream Sundae staved off competition from three other potential dishes and won a national vote to make it onto the All-Star Game menu at Citizens Bank Park.

The dish is banana pudding and vanilla soft serve topped with crushed vanilla wafers, peanut brittle, hot fudge, strawberry sauce, toasted marshmallows and red, white, and blue sprinkles, served in an All-Star souvenir cap.

The Declaration Dog (wagyu beef frank with candied bacon topping); the Liberty Stack (a chicken sandwich with peach compote and donuts instead of buns); the Revolutionary Rib Melt (which “Today Show” host Carson Daly joked is served with a side of “Ozempic sauce”) were the three defeated finalists. Any other all-star games out there in need of a specialty dish?

The white line on the side of the road is one of America’s greatest inventions (I didn’t know either!), according to the Wall Street Journal.

• One of the most crucial venues for the FIFA World Cup doesn’t hold any fans, writes SBJ’s Irving Mejia-Hilario following his recent tour of the International Broadcast Center, a 500,000 square-foot hub in Dallas that produces all the match feeds, VAR reviews and performance data.
• Gensler and ROAR are sifting through the social media posts of thousands of FIFA World Cup fans as they provide real-time commentary on their experiences in North American sports venues. Their aim is to better understand “how to make the stadium and district experience better overall for fans,” Lauren Adams, director of lifestyle research for Gensler Research Institute, told me.
• Levy was selected to provide food and beverage at Northwestern’s new Ryan Field when the most expensive college football stadium ever built opens this fall in Evanston, Ill.